Day 1: STANDBY

"I can't see a single thing going wrong this whole trip." I believe those were the words I'd uttered to Thomas upon entering through the main entrance doors to London Luton's departure terminal, in a confused tone, feigning confidence and bemusing sarcasm. It took a matter of mere minutes, and lo and behold, something went wrong (very wrong and very quickly). Standby?! Within an instant we'd gone from marvelling at our backpacks weighing only 11.1 kg and 11.2 kg respectively, to being told that we plainly had very little chance of getting on this flight at all.

So here's how it figures: Wizz Air overbooked our flight to Cluj-Napoca. I know, how does that even happen? And not by one person or even two people, but by TEN people! So what about our onward flights?? What about Nepal? As much as we tried to reason for a human explanation from the woman at the check-in desk, she was quite insistent that they can 'legally do that as per the Terms & Conditions' (thanks, very helpful) and between joking with her colleague, at least found the time to explain that we'd only know if we could board our flight at the gate itself. Well, shit. So with little more to go on, Thomas made a quick call to Chris to explain the situation, who scoured our insurance details and somehow managed to magic up a whole new backup route within the hour, to Abu Dhabi via Paris just in case. Amid the melee of the confusion, Thomas decided it'd be the perfect time to have a browse around the Lego store in duty-free (interesting choice of timing, I know.) Anyhow, between frantic attempts to book seats for our onward flight to Abu Dhabi to avoid this happening again, and despite the lack of phone signal (as well as the fact that it wouldn't even matter if we couldn't get to Cluj anyway), we beelined our way to Gate 27 to salvage what hope we had left of boarding this flight to Romania. It wasn't looking hopeful, the queue seemed to snake so far that it may as well have just zigzagged to Romania itself, and after having been sidelined by the big STANDBY letters scrawled all over our boarding passes, we watched on as almost every other passenger passed through. Finally, and only when everyone else had boarded, it became apparent that we might just make this flight after all...?! With 6 seats empty, we were very luckily chosen to sneak through and onto the plane, with me even taking the seat of one dude who rocked up to the gate literally seconds after it closed! (Sorry, not sorry). Touch and go, but we're on our way to Cluj... Now just to see if our bags end up there too ! 🥴

Big big big thanks to Dad and Mum for driving us up to the airport, and not least Chris for being on call for some admin shenanigans. This leg to Abu Dhabi had already been a rollercoaster, even before today. Our prior flight booked via Izmir, Turkey with Sun Express, a Lufthansa-Turkish mutant airline was trivially cancelled almost 2 months ago. Who says lightning doesn't strike twice?!Weiterlesen